Just One Year Until Superbowlmageddon

A year from now you will be sitting at your desk or your subway seat or maybe your private jet—yes, 12 months from now you will own a private jet; it is silver, shiny, seats 16 and has nachos and is awesome!—and you will be wondering if you should check out all of the Super Bowl stuff that's going on in this big, loud, concrete town. You may not care about football. You may not have a ticket to the actual game. It may be cold. But it also may not be cold, and it is a Super Bowl, the first ever in this region, and though you are going to be anxious about crowds and traffic and noise and just the very un-New York concept of large-scale organized group fun, you are going to be curious because, well…Super Bowl. It is a great American bacchanal, and on Feb. 2, 2014, it will be here.

Well, here and sort of here. Super Bowl XLVIII is going to be played across the Hudson, at the Meadowlands, and so this Super Bowl is going to be called the New York/New Jersey Super Bowl, which is tedious and obligatory-sounding and the kind of label that only a chamber of commerce could love. There will be people in Jersey who insist on calling it New Jersey's Super Bowl, but most people will call it the New York Super Bowl and every once in a while a politician in Jersey will throw a fit and it will be mostly for laughs, because nobody cares that much about this distinction—ask the New York Jets and the New York Giants.

All week there will be Super Bowl parties. These parties are not like the hip party you went to a couple of years ago, at that restaurant that's now out of business for that magazine that's now out of business, the one that had Cat Power cooking a turkey on the cover. Super Bowl parties are much more massive, mainstream affairs. If you go to one, you will find yourself standing outside in a long line of people—mostly guys in their mid-30s with untucked dress shirts and loafers and stomachs that have already met 16 ounces of sirloin—and you will all be there with printed-out invitations that say VIP. Despite this printed-out VIP invitation, you will stand in line long enough so that you will no longer feel your toes, and just as you are ready to quit and go home, you will finally be ushered inside and discover…3,000 other VIPs have already been ushered into this VIP event.

There may also be free booze. There will be comfortable white furniture and towers of cheese in various states of distress. There will be rumors of celebrities, and maybe actual celebrities. Not Oscar night-worthy celebrities—more like E! Channel celebrities, like that guy from that thing with who's-his-face. You will ask for a picture and he will agree. Turns out that guy from that thing with who's-his-face is totally cool. His mother lives in Paramus. You will eat chicken on a stick. Or is that lamb? Trump will swan through the room. At least it looked like Trump. It might have been Wade Phillips. You will see two Jets, two Mets and a Yankee. There will be at least a 90% chance of a band. There is a 70% chance this band will be LMFAO. You will recognize some of the songs and the room will shake so loud you can't hear yourself talk. You will leave the party three or four hours later than you expected to leave it. You will eat pizza by yourself on the train home.

The next day you get to go into work and tell everyone you went to a Super Bowl party and it was amazing.

The game itself is the fascinating part; the idea here is to finally introduce at least the chance of grizzly elements, something that the Super Bowl hasn't ever done, which is weird because football loves to brag about how rough and tumble it is and then for the season's biggest game it immediately splits to warmer climates or an indoor stadium. There will be a lot of bickering about the cold and whether or not it's fair to fans. Ha! Fans! Pro sports abandoned fans the moment they began sticking them for $9 beer, $40 parking and $30 T-shirts that fade in the dryer. I think the cold will be fine. Green Bay figures it out. If you are crazy enough to spend $3,000 on a ticket to a Super Bowl you are crazy enough to hire someone to knit you a custom set of wool pajamas before kickoff.

New York is said to be a test—if it works out here, there will be chances for other cold-weather cities with outdoor stadiums to get Super Bowls. That's the line, though I suspect it's not true. I think New York is New York: a special case. In the weeks leading up there will be panics about automobile congestion and crammed restaurants and Superbowlmageddon and you will have friends who will tell you they are splitting to Tulum because they rented their apartment in October to hopeful Dallas Cowboys fans when the Cowboys were 4-1. You will hear some freaking out but I think this game will wind up being like every event that's preceded by a public freakout: It will be more relaxed than everyone expects. And I know New York is supposed to be blasé about everything but I bet a little piece of you will be into it. I bet you will. See you in the VIP line for that party. It's already two hours long and LMFAO just started playing.

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